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Jack O’Neill is completely aware of the absurdity of his life; he knows that the choices he’s made and the circumstances he’s experienced are simply outrageous and silly (and sometimes tragic). But they brought him here, and right now “here” is a moon not orbiting Earth next to an outrageously beautiful woman who actually enjoys his company. She is also his second in command, so he tries not to notice the beautiful. Sometimes it works.
He pushes the toes of his boots against unusually fluffy dirt below him as he asks, “Hey, Carter? Do you think it’s weird we’ve never been to the moon?”
“Sir?” Her bright blue eyes only glance at him as she continues to fiddle with whatever the hell it is she has in front of her.
“I mean, you and me, us, uh, SG-1. We’ve never been to the moon.”
“We’re on a moon now,” she says without looking up at him because she's trying to make sure something about the whatever in front of her is doing the right thing.
“I mean our moon, Carter. The local one,” he says, feet nudging the little crunchy rocks against the MALP.
“Why would we go to our moon, sir?”
Jack shrugs. “I dunno.” He has no idea why he brought it up.
Sam stops her tinkering and looks up at him, a tiny smile twitching its way over her lips. “There’s nothing really useful on our moon, Sir. Unless you’ve reversed your position on rocks and soil samples, in which case NASA has you covered.”
He grimaces and sticks out his tongue in a way that reminds her of Calvin trying a food he doesn’t like in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. “Yuck, Carter, ew!”
She smiles so brightly he thinks he’ll have to report it, that kind of brightness; it must be some kind of insubordinate. He just stares at her and shakes his head.
“That’s what I thought, sir,” she says. She leans back down to the MALP and row of computers in front of her to work on whatever the hell she’s here to do. He sighs.
Later, it’s fully dark and there are a few other moons among the stars out there in that alien sky. Jack fiddles with his canteen while he watches Sam finish her dinner. He notices how she never stops working even when she’s eating, how her mouth is chewing food to put it into her body, but her eyes are on the stars and the screens. He smiles, realizing how true it had been when she’d told him that this kind of thing was fun. At the time, he’d been unwilling to believe it could be, less open to the possibility.
But here, now, with just the two of them on a funny little purple moon, he a little bit wants to understand or maybe be more willing. It’s not because she’s so beautiful in the twilight, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s because part of that beauty is the person inside, the person he thinks might be his person.
He watches her watch the sky and his heart thumps against his chest like it’s trying to escape, and for all he knows it’s trying to get to her. He knows at this moment that if she asked him to jump off the nearest cliff, the only reason he wouldn’t do it is that he can’t bear to be parted from her. What kind of unpacking is there to do about that? It’s for some other Jack in some other universe, he decides.
“I love you,” he blurts out, ungracefully.
Sam drops the remains of her dinner and raises her eyes to his. “What?”
He shrugs. “I love you.”
“I, um, what?” She’s almost glaring at him, trying to decide if he’s under some kind of alien influence.
“Stop trying to make sense of it, Carter,” he says. Because it doesn’t make any sense and he has no idea why he’s just breached every fucking boundary that exists between them.
“Are you serious?”
“Almost never.”
“You—but you, you just said you—”
“I know what I said,” Jack smiles. “I said I love you, Carter.”
“And you feel okay?”
“Have your romantic relationships been so bad that you have to ask that?”
“Sir.”
“Sorry, just sayin’.” Jack stares down at the crunchy little rocks. “I really am sorry. Look, Carter, I probably—I shouldn’t have said that. I know I shouldn’t have, and I don’t expect you to do anything about it.” He shrugs and looks up at her. “I know we agreed to leave this behind in that room, and I’m okay with that, Carter. I am. But I needed to tell you at least once, you know, away from any kind of influence or supervision or whatever.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sam says, smiling. “What makes you think we’re free of influence or supervision?”
“Well, neither of the dorks are with us—”
“Sir, are you calling Teal’c a dork?”
“Come on, of course he is,” Jack laughs.
“Yeah,” she giggles. “He is.”
“Carter,” Jack says, “To the moon and back, okay? To all the moons,” he says, kicking the largest of the crunchy rocks away and smiling brighter than he had before.
“Hey, sir?” Sam laughs, looking up at him with the most pleasant gaze he’s ever seen. “I love you, too,” she says.